HOLLYWOOD SHAPED MY HAIR. James King

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СКАЧАТЬ the hairdo.

      The Zucko hairstyle is a work of art: rich black, lustrous, greased back carefully but not too neatly, a springy curl at the front breaking away from the pack and forming a cheekily loose and louche quiff (quiff n. probably from the French ‘coiffure’, meaning ‘hairstyle’). We don’t see the back of his head much, but one can only imagine the perfection of the D.A. (D.A. n. [slang] short for ‘duck’s arse’, most famously sported by actor Tony Curtis) that resides there, the two sides of his hair uniting at the rear to form a ridge as epic as the parting of the Red Sea. There are cinematic quiffs that have been tidier (James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause) and bolder (Brad Pitt in Johnny Suede), but none have been paraded with the effortless cool of Danny. It’s like he knows he’s in a movie, being watched by millions.

      Movies were a big part of my school life. Unofficial video clubs took place in classrooms during lunch break, antiquated departmental VCRs secretly whirring away whilst the teachers were relaxing in the common room, blissfully unaware that gangs of kids were gawping at Bruce Willis slaying bad guys in Die Hard or Patsy Kensit going topless in Lethal Weapon 2. They were fun times – but I’d still rather have been watching Grease. Those films had action, sure … but Grease had a style which they were lacking. Mel Gibson’s Martin Riggs looked as if his clothing considerations every morning were little more than ‘which old lumberjack shirt to wear today’, whilst his grooming routine seemed to consist of merely a hasty running-of-hand-through-mullet. His scruffy beachside caravan living, meanwhile, hardly screamed attention to detail. Luckily the mullet look never tickled my fancy, even if there was plenty of cinematic inspiration …

       SOME (FRANKLY DISTURBING) ACTION MOVIE MULLETS OF THE ERA

      Kurt Russell in Big Trouble in Little China. Kurt’s mullet wasn’t just short on top and flowing at the back. Oh no. As if a remnant from his time playing Elvis in a 1979 TV movie, there was also a whiff of quiff in there, too. Quite the combo. The fact that Kurt always seemed to accessorise this shoulder-tickling barnet with a white singlet only made him look all the more like an out-of-work logger from Oregon.

      Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone. Beginning with a centre parting, Mike’s mid-Eighties hair was then brushed back into a startling bouffant that was pure Duran Duran. That was the hairstyle’s problem: it was far too pretty for a real man of action buckling his swash in the Colombian jungle. Mike still has the do to this day, not one to let old age get in the way of a good blow-dry.

      Patrick Swayze in Road House. The favourite movie of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin saw Swayze at his hardest. Check the cover of the DVD for proof that few things look more menacing than a man with a mullet standing with his arms crossed. Still, the few strands of hair that Swayze let delicately tumble over his forehead hinted at a softer side (more of which later).

      Sylvester Stallone in Rambo III. John Rambo might be one of the ultimate movie tough guys but he still made the effort to accessorise his scruffy locks with a bandana. What’s more, by 1988’s Rambo III, I swear he’d been using a diffuser, his poodle hair then more Def Leppard than First Blood.

      Hulk Hogan in Suburban Commando. I’ve never understood the man with receding hair who thinks that growing it really long at the back will somehow create a ‘trompe l’œil’, disguising his shortcomings. Even worse, Hulk is known for dying that long bit peroxide blonde; his horseshoe moustache, too. (For some reason, years later in 1997, it was exactly such a mullet that was the style choice for a receding Nicolas Cage in Con Air. The combination of long frizzy extensions, a rapidly enlarging cranium and huge sweaty biceps gave Nic the unique appearance of an especially muscly Bee Gee.)

       PRODUCT PLACEMENT

      Unlike those guys, Zucko made a proper effort. And Grease itself made style a priority. It’s all there in the opening credit: a cartoon Danny standing in front of the mirror, lacing his locks with product and making sure his soft quiff is just right. Of course, with animated credits like that, you know you’re in for something where style is all-important. If film producers go to that much trouble just for the first few minutes, you can only imagine what the rest of the film is going to be like (see the ultra-chic Priceless and the classy Catch Me If You Can for further evidence of this equation. Hell, you could even try eighties cheese-fest Mannequin, a film that – if there’s any sort of message in amongst the wonky sets and ropey stereotypes – is about the importance of great window dressing). There’s something brilliantly optimistic about starting a film with an animation, playfully turning the movie’s characters into wacky cartoons – because they’re that awesome – before we’ve even got to know them. The mood is perfectly set up just in those opening Grease credits (by the late, Wimbledon-born John D.Wilson, a former Disney man), where John Travolta looks like one of those pencil-drawn caricatures that you get done when you’re drunk and on holiday. Which, interestingly, is rather how he now looks in real life.

      By the time the boring cropped hair and grubby white vests of Bruce Willis were leaving me cold during those lunch-breaks, I had been obsessed with Grease for years. Though I was young, I have a very distinct, remarkably clear memory of dancing around to ‘Summer Nights’ in an outfit that I had specially created for the occasion. I could only manage a jumble sale denim jacket, not a leather T-Birds one, but for someone only in single figures such savvy compromise still gives me a little shiver of satisfaction. In the memory, I am in the middle of the living room, slinging my jacket over my shoulder and punching the air as Danny Zucko hit that famous final high note, standing in the bleachers. My parents are the audience. My sister is Sandy. I sing like my life depends on it, John Travolta meets Aled Jones. In reality, my fringe hangs heavy over my eyes but in my mind, I am quiffed.

      It was only a matter of time before those dreams became a reality. With parents whose own childhood had been during the real Grease era (the story takes place in the 1959–60 academic year), their encouragement in getting me to slick back my hair like a rock ‘n’ roll throwback was no surprise. I must have been one of the few pre-pubescent boys to regularly receive a bottle of Cossack men’s hairspray for birthdays and Christmas. (Cossack smelled spicy, musky and manly; what some lab guy obviously thought was the essence of the eighteenth-century Slavic military, even though it was made in Folkestone, Kent. When my bottle ran out I had to borrow my Mum’s slightly less Ukranian-whiffing Silvikrin.)

      I had formerly tried mousse in order to achieve my desired Travolta quiff, carefully following the instructions to squirt out a golf ball-sized dollop of the airy foam then combing it through my locks into the required shape. But as well as setting hair into position, mousse also gave it what the beauty industry terms ‘body’. So, whilst it definitely gave me the vertical hold I was after, it also had an effect horizontally. My hair expanded outwards into something massive. Brush through with a few lumps of mousse and my barnet boasted less of the sharp attitude of Danny Zucko and more of the flouncy prettiness of Wham!-era George Michael. Not what I was after.

      Ideally I wanted to use wet-look hair gel, specifically Wella’s Shock Waves since it was advertised in Smash Hits every issue and – back in the eighties – boasted excitingly cutting-edge, Piet Mondrian-style blocks of colour on the packaging. However, since the use of wet-look hair gel had, for reasons now lost in the mists of time, been banned at my uptight all-boys school I found that a combination of water and Cossack was the next best thing. A significant fire hazard I might have been, but at least my Zucko hair remained in position through even the most rough-and-tumble PE lesson on a trampette.

      Not that my fellow pupils understood the greatness of this, of course. One boy СКАЧАТЬ